Car Company

They wanted to

Create a connected car platform with a technology-focused approach to redefining transportation and mobility.

We helped them

Build the cloud-based platform, The Project (Next-Generation Mobility), which enables a new generation of shared, connected, and electric services that help revolutionize urban mobility.

About Car Company and The Project

Car Company, a part of the $19 billion USD Car Company Group, is an Electric Vehicle (EV) Manufacturer based in India, which provides next-generation transportation and mobility solutions. At the 2018 Auto Expo, Car Company shared their plans to shape the ‘Future of Mobility,’ which showcased Car Company’s technological advancements, and sustainable mobility solutions that address the evolving preferences and needs of consumers. The company’s suite of unique future-ready mass and passenger mobility concepts, products, and solutions are developed around Car Company’s 'Clean, Connected and Convenient,' (3C's) philosophy. We built the extensible The Project (Next-Generation Mobility app) connected car platform for Car Company, which helps them realize their 3C vision. NEMO was launched early in 2019. This coincides with the completion of over 100 million electric kilometers by Car Company EVs.

Problem

Today, most ‘dumb cars’ are transformed into connected cars by installing an aftermarket device that connects to the ODB-II port to provide connected car features. Car Company Electric uses an integrated approach to create real connected cars with a modem and other hardware built into the cars, allowing them to connect directly to the internet and share data with cloud applications. When we first engaged with Car Company, they had cars with connected car hardware, but they needed help architecting, designing, and developing cloud, web, and mobile software applications .

Car Company’s 3C vision required a suite of software products built around their connected EVs, but Car Company lacked the cloud, big data, mobile, and web development expertise required to build a world-class connected car platform. The software Car Company desired to build brought together multiple concepts including fleet management, car-sharing, ride-sharing, and much more. Because Car Company wanted to create an extensible platform with features tailored to their requirements, they decided to build a custom software suite capable of integrating with every EV model in their lineup.

Solution

When Car Company approached us to build the The Project platform, they defined extensibility as a key feature, allowing them to support current and future mobility needs. The NEMO connected platform provides is designed to deliver value across the mobility ecosystem including drivers, commuters, fleet owners, and operators. The platform addresses individual requirements of various segments of urban mobility including corporate commuting, car-sharing, and ride-sharing.

Ride and car-sharing drivers access numerous features including battery consumption, vehicle monitoring as well as the ability to plan a trip to reduce barriers to EV adoption like range anxiety. Car-sharing customers can find, reserve, check-out, and check-in cars from designated car-sharing charging stations. Ride-sharing drivers can accept, decline, pick-up, and drop-off riders when they’re marked as available in the app.

Commuters have the ability to hail rides like Uber, Lyft, and Ola. The The Project Driver and Commuter applications enable ride-hailing operators to seamlessly manage, plan and automate the end-to-end transportation needs for users. Commuters can see their ride history and manage payment methods like other ride-sharing apps.

Fleet owners and operators manage their fleet of electric vehicles using fleet management, real-time location, trip planning, and maintenance features. Each stakeholder in the mobility ecosystem has a set of web and mobile apps designed to work seamlessly with the other NEMO services. Operators can even use Car Company’s certified service network to perform maintenance on EVs in their fleet.

Geofencing, a virtual barrier made possible by GPS tracking, is a valuable tool for fleet managers. If a vehicle enters or leaves an area, fleet managers get an automatic notification if when they utilize the fleet management software we built. Geofences and the alerts they generate tell fleet managers when a driver gets close to the destination, or whether the driver is going somewhere they shouldn’t be. While there are a lot of use cases for geofencing, it took time to engineer a robust backend capable of updating the locations of hundreds of vehicles in realtime.

The backend application is built with NodeJS and hosted on Google Cloud. Cassandra is used as a distributed database for some features and Postgres is used to store relational data. To provide better data processing and machine learning features, we used Python and Pyspark. The web client is built with Angular and the iOS and Android mobile apps are both native to provide end-users with the best user experience.

Results

In early 2019, the experimental town of Auroville agreed to a two-year pilot program with Car Company to realize their 3C vision on a community scale by creating India’s first sustainable integrated mobility ecosystem. Through this partnership, Car Company aims to enable transportation models like ridesharing, ride-hailing, and car-sharing rentals by deploying the cloud-enabled mobility platform The Project. Auroville attracts over 5,000 visitors per day and 100-500 of those visitors are expected to use Car Company’s transportation and mobility services each day.